Sunday, August 29, 2010

Canada has high hopes in regards to Kestrel pot auto

Green automotive news has received a hit of exciting news. Fast Business indicates that a Calgary, Alberta, business called Motive Industries is bringing a new electric auto with bio-composite design to market in Canada. The Kestrel will hit the avenues with its very green hemp construction. You heard right; it’s a green marijuana auto.

Weed automobile an item of the Hempcar Program

Understandably, the Kestrel has sparked up controversy. We are talking about marijuana, and Americans can’t resist the boogeyman. Canadian activist group Hempcar.org trumpeted a 2001 American road tour of 10,000 miles undertaken by a car comparable to the Kestrel, but not constructed of pot fiber. The experimental vehicle they used ran on hemp biodiesel, which is not currently the case with the Kestrel, although it might eventually come to pass. The U.S. has yet to make cultivating industrial hemp lawful, though, so they won’t know what it is like. Considering the industrial hemp necessary has no psychoactive properties and is not a drug, Hemp-car.org found America’s lack of response bewildering.

With hemp from Alberta Innovates Technology Futures

The Kestrel gets its hemp raw material from a Vegreville, Alberta farm via Alberta Innovates Technology Futures. Hemp for body construction is lightweight, renewable and strong as glass composite, reports Fast Business.When Kestrel nevertheless has a solutions to go before full production, Motive expects they’ll be able to start testing by year’s end.

Back in 1925, Henry Ford knew it would work

”The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything,” said Henry Ford to the New York Times nearly 90 years ago, or so Hempcar.org says. ”There is fuel in each bit of vegetable matter that could be fermented”.

Henry Ford most certainly was including hemp in the above discussion. To prove his theory, he made a auto out of hardened hemp fibers and fueled it with ethanol made from hemp biodiesel fuel. Ford could have saved the country’s farmers from the grip of the Good Depression. It would benefit Ford tremendously and revive American agriculture. However, Congress eventually passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Once the DuPont company and newspaper uber-baron William Randolph Hearst had their say, hemp was buried beneath pages of unnecessary laws. Ford’s path of innovation was closed.